Today I noticed a lot of industry Facebook friends “friending” an ad agency’s Facebook page, so I checked it out. I clicked on their Website link and “poof”!… I was greeted by a splash page that took 5 seconds to load, served up a Flash-based 2 second animation, and then took another couple of seconds to redirect me to their main Website.

I just don’t get it… why are companies, particularly my colleagues at ad agencies, so fascinated and obsessed with splash pages. They’re annoying, they’re dated, and worst of all, they force users to have to “consume” some usually uselesss, disjointed animation illustrating how cool they are. If your animation was so cool, or interesting, why not give site visitors the option to view it on their own. Why force them?

Also, why give visitors, who are usually looking to learn about the agency, a reason to leave before they get to the real site?

Again, maybe I’m off here, but does anything see things differently?

On the other hand, I think about the incredible complexity of the digital strategy world and the trend towards specialization and wonder if merging the Planner and Digital Strategist is feasible? For instance, with the rise of unique digital areas of specialty / expertise such as information architecture, user experience planning, analytics and social media, the role of digital strategist appears to to be too much of a simplification and generalist position out of sync with the rapid changes in digital communications?

What do you think?

The new site provide a lot of information in very engaging formats, including an interactive map and variety of reporting tools on how the Recovery Act money is being spent. It’s also a clean, organized and highly usable Web site. Federal Computer Week ran a nice piece on the site launch.

Yet, as someone who has been running a Web development firm for 11+ years, I still can’t connect the dots on how it could possibly cost $9.5 million to build. Even though it is a large, complex site, with a lot of back-end integration, a sophisticated and highly customized CMS, and significant hardware/hosting infrastructure, not to mention an aggressive roll-out (I think the site was built in 4 or 5 months), the price tag still seems way too steep.

Let’s look at it this way – assuming a $200/hr blended rate, and subtracting a healthy $1 million for hardware and software, that works out to roughly 42,500 man-hours. Assuming a 5 month timeline, that represents 8,500 man-hours per month, or 53 FTEs dedicated to the project. There is no way 53 full-time, 100% dedicated / utilized individuals were required to build this site. No way.

Kudos to Smartronix for making a lot money in 2009!